April 13, 2012

"The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic," writes Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. "Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance."

It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.”... Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).”

This week in The [New Yorker] magazine, Ariel Levy writes about “The Joy of Sex.” Here is a comparison of the original 1972 edition, by the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort, and the new “ultimate revised edition.”

An illustration from the “rear-entry” section. The original edition of “Joy of Sex” referred to another variation of rear-entry intercourse as sex “à la Négresse.” Other “outrageous Comfortisms” include “Don’t get yourself raped” and “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.”

"The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex."

It is akin to what they used to say about drugs - that there aren't any good ones left, because our generation did them all. Well, it seems even more true that there isn't a lot of sex left because so much of the good stuff was used up by our baby boom generation.

I was a child in in the seventies, and I used to take sneak peeks into The Joy of Sex to try to figure out what this sex thing was all about. That book turned me off any thought of sex. It wasn't until I was a freshman in college and saw this painting that I realized there could be joy associated with sex.

The dude in the Joy of Sex was a hippy dude because the Joy of Sex was a celebration of the Hippy "free love" attitude. Sympathetic hipsers bought the book back when it came out. I remember it being somewhat subversive to have that publicly displayed in the home.

I was a student at UW when Joy of Sex was published. My (then) girlfriend and I bought a copy just to be sure that we hadn't overlooked any stuff. We hadn't.

The illustrations were hilarious, but remember, this was a mainstream book in the early 70s.

Many bookstores wouldn't carry it. Publishing the book with photos (rather than the hokey drawings) of actual humans engaging in the sexual positions described would have been pornographic by the standards of the day, and Joy of Sex wound never had made it to the few book sellers that carried it.

Side-note: Alex Comfort had a very heated argument with George Orwell on the eve of WWII. Comfort was an "aggressive" pacifist who wanted England to disarm in the face of German aggression, and who condemned those who would fight as morally depraved. He said that he would not fight Hitler under any circumstances, and if England fell he would simply retreat to America where would be protected by 3,000 miles of ocean--and many millions of men and women who were infinitely his superiors.

I don't remember with certainty the names of the publications in which the letters and essays appeared (Partisan Review was probably one of them) but one of them begins with Orwell's famous "pacifism is objectively pro-fascist". The entire exchange is collected in My Country Right or Left 1940-1943: The Collected Essays Journalism & Letters of George Orwell.

I'm 61 and this is the first time I've ever seen those illustrations. I had to google them. Very strange. I wonder what people did for check-off lists before this came out. My husband and I had to create our own.

edutcher: I note the horror of it blocked the sight of the women from your memory.

I was trying to be polite and genteel in not also mentioning the lumpy, wrinkled, unsavory type of women that were portrayed, often just as hairy, with big glasses, as their dinosaur hippie "lovers." The kind of folk who go to nudist colonies and swinger parties, as shown in these shows, are not the "beautiful people."

Well, to tell from the constantly joyless and angry and bitter attacks and rants that routinely come from our gay friends who comment here -- it is reasonable to conclude that there is no joy in homosexuality (or in most leftist sexuality -- Miss Fluke certainly has been no bundle of joy).

Joy seems an exalted word to use in describing sex. I think it takes away from the meaning of joy as I understand it. Pleasure or ecstasy or delight or gratifications sound better to me for describing sex. Maybe just me?